Chapter Thirty-Nine

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

VASSAGO WAS lifted from the bones; extricated from his cruel prison with strange gentleness.

The simurgh had shaped itself around the bones that invaded him, and now the Cultivation filled him with a comforting lightness.

‘I am no failure.' The words blurted from him, straining free from where Blood Lake's morbid heart had trapped them earlier.

‘Never.'

The tone sent a rapturous thrill through his ravaged body. Vassago opened his eyes. He was overshadowed by an enormity that was unmistakable. He was cradled in the palm of a great hand, an island of refuge in this groundless place.

‘Silas.'

Although perhaps only in name. There was a hint of the man amongst the shadows and greatness, but Vassago suspected his own imagination placed them there.

‘Do not fear me.'

Silas's voice held the distant rumble of thunder and disturbed the very waters of the lake. Waters that still held the thinnest trace of Vassago's blood. But these ancient flood waters would find no more sustenance from him. They could not reach the safe place where his ankou kept him.

‘Never.' He repeated Silas's words back to him. ‘And I ask the same of you.'

How raw his voice sounded; hanging onto its humanity by the last thread.

‘You know you do not need to ask that of me. We shall always know each other.'

Silas had always been wiser than he.

Vassago could not even contemplate fearing this creature. This giant. Silas was written all over the greatness; there beneath the thick mess of black hair, wild as a jungle and just as vast. He was there in the darkness of a beard that hung like a cliff. He was there in brown eyes large as ponds, and there in lips that stretched like banks of sunset clouds.

Vassago–no, it was Pitch, for just a moment more–braced against the astonishing girth of Silas's fingers, and pulled himself onto his knees. Every hole in his body sent a chorus of biting protest, but the simurgh swept into the cavities and the pain grew dull.

‘Careful now, my darling.'

And there Silas was again, unchangeable and unabashed.

Pitch leaned over the ankou's thumb, one thick as a shot tower, and watched as his giant carried him closer to the pyre where the halo stood embedded. He glimpsed movement far below, a shifting of white, and his flames lashed beneath his skin. Silas's body, the hillside that it was, was being overrun by the bones. They covered him like barnacles, sharp as oysters and climbing ever higher through the shadowy vagueness of his lower body.

‘Silas, do they harm –'

‘Do what you must, Pitch.' The thunder rolled. ‘And leave them to me. I will hold them back.' Silas lifted his other hand, rattling the chain of an enormous mace; its spikes glinting silver.

Pitch's grin was vicious, a flicker of bloodlust rising. The simurgh brushed a wing against the back of his eyes. What a sweet fucking irony this was. A child of Samyaza would deliver his destroyer to the halo.

His eyes blazed, his skin stretched with the strain of a rising inferno. His mind was as crystalline clear as the lake. All the bitter, soul-eating destitution of earlier was vanished. He was washed clean of doubt. And there was no entrance for it to return.

Pitch looked up at his favourite monster.

‘Oh, I do love you, Mr Mercer.'

Silas smiled, and the merest rise of his lips cast a breeze in the stagnant air. Thunder prowled. ‘Then I need no death wish. All that I desire, I have already.'

Pitch rose to his feet, teeth sharp at his bottom lip. He would give Silas one last gift, if such a thing could be said of standing naked with all ugliness exposed. But he knew the ankou wanted all of him. So he would give it.

‘I am ready.'

Silas's pond-wide eyes glittered, and the slow nod of his head was like the felling of an oak. Slow and steady and irreversible.

Pitch reached his fingers to his own cheek and dug his fingernails into his beautiful disguise. Silas's eyes never left him, as all of Blood Lake screamed. The clatter of the bones grew frantic, manic. There was chaos below. But not above.

Pitch shed his skin.

Tore strips from the facade he had built, and let go the delicate beauty he so coveted. He laid himself bare beneath the unwavering gaze of the Nephilim. Showing Silas his true self, wanting him to know every layer that existed before all was said and done.

The Dominion emerged; his true daemonic form. Black and hard as basalt, with rivulets of fire running like magma through a spiderweb of veins. Rough-hewn, and impenetrable. And though he bore the same limbs as purebreds, his were harsher in their lines; cut carelessly, with need only for bestial strength.

Little trace of beauty was found in the brutish assembly of a daemon.

His flesh fell away, his bloodless skin gathering in Silas's palm.

Vassago grew, swelling so large his lithic physique dangled over the edges of the ankou's colossal hold. But still their eyes did not leave one another.

Vassago's burned like the belly of a volcano; while Silas's were warm and brown as tilled earth.

The ankou's fingers splayed, giving a daemon space to grow. Unafraid of touching what so many feared.

No words moved between them as they drank in all of each other. They hid nothing from one another. No more secrets existed.

Silas delivered Vassago to the very top of the pyre, gentle to the last. A look passed between them, volumes said in the glance.

Pitch turned, ready.

He leapt.

The journey from haven to cursed halo was a short one.

And the final game play began.

The screams that came from the lake matched those of the fiercest battle on the Hellfield, but Pitch did not utter a sound as he lunged. He wrapped daemonic hands around the black leather hilt, dug his feet into the pitiful dead, and welcomed the surge of the simurgh within.

The wildness poured from his natural seams, unifying his fire with the Cultivation's subtler hues, casting a spotlight upon all that remained of the traitor king.

Pitch hauled on the hilt, while the calamitous crunch of bone grew louder. He knew Silas held back the tide that threatened. Vassago relied on it.

There was no shift in the sword from its bedrock of bone.

Once more, Pitch heaved on the ancient weapon. Again, there was nothing. The simurgh pressed beneath his hardened skin, billowing, eager to be set free. Pitch ground teeth of rock, his fury cracking open new fissures in his form.

A ripple ran along his spine, tracing the lines where the amuletum had laid, pooling around the great gash in his exterior made by Seraphiel's halo. There was no hint of his molten flame in that place, extinguished eternally, an abyss he would always carry.

But he had survived. Not only the Seraph's blast, but the mess it had made of him after, and before.

He would not succumb here.

Vassago resettled his hands. The cacophony of the lake's protest rose, the cries of a thousand deaths, and two thousand years of resentment drove at him, made razor-sharp by desperation.

He tried to pull the blade from the bone another time. Then another.

With each try his fury bubbled; with each failure rage ate greedily at his patience.

On the sixth try, he was livid, driving his foot into the shattered remains, screaming his foul discontent. Cursing all manner of man and god. His flames billowed, his desperation to see this done hollowed him out.

Something turned his head. An impulse that struck him firm and fast.

And changed everything.

The ankou was down, smothered by the bones, a few trails of his hair like long black rivers cutting through the clear waters. He was buried, yet again, and in water none the less.

The Berserker Prince's roar resonated through the pyre, setting the halo vibrating with a ferocity that fed his insatiable hunger to destroy. Sweltering mindlessness took hold. Lust, the most savage and bloodthirsty of its kind, tangled through his flames, setting him ablaze.

The simurgh screamed. The halo groaned. The bones cried for mercy.

On the seventh attempt, Samyaza's halo slid free of its bony sheath.

The prince held the halo aloft, his entire body aflame, bones turning to ash around him. The simurgh crashed against his basalt walls, cracking them open; the wildness was intoxicating. Vassago dived into the intoxicating bedlam of fury. He rivalled a hundred suns. Never had he burned so.

But it was not only he who must burn.

Guided by instinct, he aimed the tip of the halo towards the black crags of his chest and drove the blade into his ill-beating heart.

The simurgh was there, the Primordial Flame at its own heart. Positioned perfectly. Waiting for this longed-for spark.

Seraphiel's work was complete.

The stupendous collision of ancient death wish and divine Cultivation shifted the world beneath Pitch's feet. Then vanished that ground altogether. But he did not fall.

He soared.